Tag: Poetry
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Two Poems by Graciela Reyes, trans. Jackie K. White
Nightingale The good nightingalecarries her song in her throat. It’s me you were discovering. The joy of those sunrises:that we were our own joy. She knew how to skip contentedly, like a little tomboy, in the middle of the street.She knew how to speak, how to be silent, to sleep.Yes, she was lovely and sweetness,…
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Two Poems by Anzhelina Polonskaya, trans. Andrew Wachtel
Abyssal Like a whole winter. Like Bruegel in the snow with hunters,and kennels of barking dogs.In deep barbarism, in the depths of perpetuity,in the fury of flames, February lasts for years. Dead.But its shadow lives.And I grow in its shadow like bitter grass,unable to shatter the fetters of ice, listening your breath, my sadness.My sadness:…
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I THINK YOU SHOULD NOT LET THIS TORTURE YOU by Miriam Milena
When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished. –Czeslaw Milosz Words from a man I want to make my husband: I think you should go for the biggest thing you can think of— I go for a walk under old growth Sitka spruce— look at the ground— try to imagine all the biggest things I…
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PERIHELION by Ben Kline
The summer after Halley’s Comet swung do-si-doaround the solar system, I grew six inches,and a local boy who helped usbale hay on Saturdaysnecked me behind the corn criblike a fawn on a salt block,his eyes too bright to deny.My belly burned for days. After a weekin binoculars, the comet taught meabout sublimation and Kepler, spacetimeas…
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INCOMPLETENESS THEOREM by Eleanor Stanford
The train to the city was alwayslate. I dressed in silk straps decoratedwith every seductive spell.I pricked myself to test their strength. Buta system cannot demonstrateits own consistency. I did not longto merge with the mathematician. In hisstark apartment at Ninth and South, wecollided. We made adiagonal argument.My living situation took a long timeto explain.…
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THOUGHTS ON EVAPORATION – A ZUIHITSU by Sarah Mills
In one of my earliest memories, my mother asks me what I want to be for Halloween and I say a lake, which she mishears as leek, so she starts talking about how leeks accumulate dirt, something I didn’t appreciate until the first time I made potato-leek stew, the grit like tiny beads that had…
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LULLABY* by Tran Tran
Con cò mà đi ăn đêm** Đậu phải cành mềm, lộn cổ xuống ao *** Night darkens on an egret’s porcelain wings. A lullaby begins and ends with silence. Mother’s love begins and ends with silence. A branch snaps. The egret tumbles into death. A bomb blasted. My mother tumbled into orphanhood. What’s unsung: the baby egret’s hunger—orphaned…
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I CONSIDER WHAT TO SAY WHEN MY DOCTOR ASKS ME TO DESCRIBE MY PAIN by Emma Bolden
Nothing. I can’t construct a sentence able to withholdthe weight of it; I can’t explain or calculate the kind of weightI mean, what it is that I am with or holding. In high school a teacher explained the difference betweenmetaphor and simile in terms of distance. I imagined likeor as as a door cracked, light…
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HYPERPHAGIA, OR FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE by Matty Layne Glasgow
Famished, he did not understand hungeruntil it fueled a metamorphosis. An animal does what he does. A boy, thin and lithe,grows with each taste: his mother’s milk, a crabapple pawed from its branch. Later,a man’s tongue. Come spring, fur meadows his once-pink skin, hangs loose from a belly,from fragile limbs. Soft, love can leave one…
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Two Poems by Margaret Wright
Memorial who’s awake right nowin Utah this cinema of long hair, God in undergrad, youngest cousin in the youngest lake, we’ll bring a baby next time, my sister says, we’ll bring a kid, & then we drive away thinking about aunt becki, todd, black hair,…
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To Tread the Past with Empathic Attention: Interview with Arden Levine on SPOKE
Until Arden Levine’s Spoke, we didn’t realize we’d actually been waiting for someone to reinvent the wheel. Yet here it is, with its clean lines and hard curves, each perfectly crafted poem a tensile strand of bodily sinew radiating from a hub of composed observation. At that hub, the life and early death of a…
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Arielle Hebert’s Debut Is an Elegy for Her Queer Girlhood in a Circus Town
Arielle Hebert and I are approximately 7, 100 miles apart from one another when we hop on Zoom to talk about her debut collection of poems, Bottom Feeders – neither of us in the places we grew up, though that’s exactly what Bottom Feeders is all about. Hebert’s debut is a gutsy, sultry collection, set…